As morning broke over San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge Thursday, traffic was brought to a halt as dozens of undocumented mothers, students and their allies risked arrest to engage in civil disobedience.
Traffic piled up on the bridge’s northbound lanes as protesters decried the Democrats’ lack of action to pass meaningful immigration reform, stopping morning commuters for about an hour.
“We are escalating our actions and our undocumented families are risking arrest and possibly deportation to send the message we can no longer wait,” said DACA recipient, Luis Angel Reyes Savalza, himself an undocumented immigrant.
Spirits were high among the few dozen who stopped morning bridge commuters, despite potentially harrowing consequences if any were arrested.
Some protesters were issued citations Thursday morning, but it did not appear that the civil disobedience on the bridge led to any arrests.
“The immigrant community has endured a politics of fear from both Democrats and Republicans over the last 20 years, from horrific family separations, to for profit detention which has skyrocketed beyond recognition, inhumane treatment inside detention centers and caging children at the border,” Reyes Savalza said.
Traffic on the bridge started flowing again shortly before 8 a.m. as the protest wound down.
Immigration activists shut down traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge to protest 20 years of congressional inaction on immigration, calling on Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, in San Francisco, Calif. on September 30, 2021.
Noah Berger / Special to the ChronicleThe protest, organized by the Movement for Citizenship for All (Papeles Para Todos) and the Bay Area Coalition for Economic Justice and Citizenship for All, also centered on climate and racial justice issues. They demanded a fairer economy.
“We were called essential workers and yet both the Trump and Biden administrations excluded undocumented families from stimulus relief,” Reyes Savalza told The Chronicle.
The early morning car blockade of traffic was timed to coincide with a possible vote in Congress on the budget reconciliation bill, demanding Democrats override the Senate parliamentarian who excluded immigration provisions from the $3.5 trillion bill.
The activists’ frustration with Washington has an obvious antecedent: Immigration reform has been a perennial goal for lawmakers and presidents that always fails, sometimes spectacularly.
There have been attempts in the last 20 years that got close, most recently in 2013, when the Senate passed what has become known as the “Gang of Eight” immigration compromise. The massive bill to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants, overhaul the legal immigration system and beef up border security passed with a veto-proof majority of more than two-thirds of the Senate, an overwhelming level of consensus.
But it died in the House, where Republicans grew skittish of backlash for anything perceived as “amnesty” toward undocumented immigrants. That position in the GOP calcified with the rise of former President Donald Trump, who injected hardline anti-immigration policies into the mainstream of the party.
Even widely popular policies like providing a path to citizenship for the so-called Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, has been difficult to achieve, as the widely supported idea tends to get bogged down by other political interests trying to catch a ride.
With Democrats in full control of Washington, advocates were hoping the left would have learned its lesson during the Obama administration, when immigration reform wasn’t a priority in the key first years of power.
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So far President Joe Biden has rested immigration hopes on a procedural tactic that would allow Democrats to attach legalization to a budget bill and bypass the standard needed for 60 votes in the 100- member Senate to advance legislation. The prospects for that plan are exceedingly grim, as the Senate’s arbiter of procedural rules has now ruled twice, most recently on Wednesday, that Democrats’ proposals don’t pass muster to qualify for the maneuver, known as reconciliation.
Advocates on the left have called on Biden and Senate Democrats to simply overrule the parliamentarian and pass it anyway or do away with the 60-vote threshold requirement altogether, but Biden, a former senator, has resisted.
According to the protest’s organizers, Thursday’s bridge shutdown was just the beginning of a renewed and more aggressive push for the immigration movement, one that will draw on the mass street protests and strikes of 2006 when millions left work and took to the streets demanding change.
Fiftenn years later, things are only worse, protestors said. Deportations removed many who were active in the immigrant rights movement, and then the pandemic ripped through already vulnerable immigrant communities. Reyes Savalza said people are left feeling like they don’t have much else to lose.
“We have learned from this and call on all undocumented immigrants and our allies to unite and strike, this time for citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country,” he said.
Deepa Fernandes and Tal Kopan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: deepa.fernandes@sfchronicle.com, tal.kopan@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @deepafern, @talkopan
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